12.34. Hot-Swapping Devices (MultiBay, SelectBay, ..)

Some laptops (usually the more expensive ones) come
with a free slot, which may bear a second hard disk or CD/DVD drive.
Every manufacturer seems to name it differently,
names like MultiBay(TM) and SelectBay(TM) are common. Different
Linux tools are available to handle these hot-swapping devices.

Hotswap
is a utility to register and deregister hotswappable IDE
hardware. It is written to be used on Laptops with some sort of
hardware bay to remove the module from the machine without rebooting
it.
Note that this utility is not required to insert or remove batteries
or floppy disk drives; only for IDE devices.

The hard disk management tool hdparm also
comes with a hot swap option.

Some bays can (in some cases only) carry a second battery. Currently I
don't know how Linux can handle this. For example are there
any tools, which show battery stats for the second battery?